Beyond the bandwidth-length product: Graded index microstructured polymer optical fiber

Abstract

Large core multimode polymer fibers for high data rate transmission are an important growth area. The conventional approach to reducing the intermodal dispersion in such fibers is to use a graded index (GI) profile. More recently, microstructures rather than differences in chemical composition have been used to produce the GI structure. We compare the bandwidth performance of two GI microstructured fibers to a conventional GI fiber made from the same material. The microstructured fibers not only show excellent bandwidth performance but also their bandwidth has an unconventional length dependence: no additional pulse broadening beyond a characteristic length.

Cleaving of TOPAS and PMMA microstructured polymer optical fibers: Core-shift and statistical quality optimization

“…Since then mPOFs with a large variety of hole structures and thus specific optical properties, have been fabricated at the OFTC, including endlessly single-mode mPOFs [2][3], multi-mode graded-index mPOFs (GImPOFs) [2,4], hollow-core photonic bandgap guiding mPOFs [2][3]5], highly birefringent mPOFs [2], twin-core mPOFs, [2], rectangular core mPOFs [4], solution-doped mPOFs [3,6]. All these mPOFs have been made of conventional PMMA, which is commercially available in optical-grade quality granulates and low industry-grade solid rods.…”

Thermal tunability of photonic bandgaps in liquid crystal infiltrated microstructured polymer optical fibers

“…Since the first fabrication of microstructured Polymer Optical Fibers (mPOFs) in Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA, n=1.49 @589.3nm, 20°C) by Eijkelenborg et al [13], mPOFs have been made using a variety of polymers, such as Topas (cyclic olefin copolymer) [15][16][17] and biodegradable polymers [18]. The standard single-mode mPOF has a triangular hole structure with a single hole size, but much more complicated hole structures can be made, such as the one used to make for example graded-index mPOFs [19,20]. Argyros et al fabricated the first hollow-core bandgap mPOF with PMMA [21] and Cox el al.…”

Error free 9.5 Gb/s transmission over 50 m of multimode microstructured polymer optical fibre

“…Previous studies on similar fibres [2] have shown that the bandwidth-length product is not constant with fiber length. We expect that Modal filtering is playing a significant role in the generation of this high bandwidth.…”

“…Typically these data links operate in the visible spectrum and the data rates of these links are low and limited by the bandwidth of the POFs. In previous works it has been demonstrated that utilising microstructure -microstructured polymer optical fibres (mPOF) [1] -significant improvements in the bandwidths can be achieved [2,3].…”